Today we are chatting with Nathan Leamer, Executive Director of Build American AI and a longtime fixture in DC’s tech-policy circles, for a rapid-fire tour through the fights shaping America’s AI buildout. We dig into “Humans First,” a self-styled conservative anti-AI group that Leamer has been researching — an operation incorporated in San Francisco, seeded by Center for AI Safety money, and staffed by “Pause AI” activists, yet positioning itself as grassroots and right-coded ahead of a wave of planned data center protests. Against the backdrop of China’s rapidly advancing models, we discuss how sabotaging domestic data center construction is exactly the wrong move at exactly the wrong moment.
From there the conversation turns to the economics and politics of the buildout itself: the tens of thousands of construction jobs tied to a single facility, the comparison to 1950s interstate highway spending, and why so much of this investment is landing in rural Virginia, Ohio, Texas, and Florida rather than Silicon Valley. We also work through why skepticism of AI runs deep on the right — from distrust of Big Tech’s politics to fears of a surveillance state — while arguing the “AI will destroy jobs” narrative keeps failing to materialize, pointing to a fresh wave of American entrepreneurship instead.
